Colors

Colors

      I'm not a fan of the monochrome of winter.

      The winter is brown, black, gray and white. North of about latitude 30°: months in a row. Day after short, dark day. Wind. Damp cold. Desert dry house.

      Rogers Hornsby, the Hall of Fame baseball player, said: “People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”

      OK, I'm not quite that bad. I wander out, poke a few holes in the ground, mix a little dirt, pull dead leaves off the bushes and generally putter around, but it's not the same as the rest of the year.

      Winter colors? Holiday lights are fine in December evenings, but if they made up for the colors of our gardens we'd simply put up strings of them and declare our labors at an end.

      Colorless can work: there is an artistic genre which specializes in black and white photography, emphasizing the form of objects without the distraction of color. Nice in small doses.

      From late winter through early spring the shoots of bulbs expand and provide a daily surprise.        Crocus' are the first to break the gloom with bright oranges, yellows and purples. They're small and it's rare to see a large area covered with them, but they confirm the early spring.

     And then the azaleas. Lords of all they survey, coming at you with a brilliance that transforms the world! After the brown, black, gray and white of winter, our love affair with gardens is renewed. And what are those bright azalea colors that say “Spring!'? Reds, pinks, oranges, lavenders, and purples. It's too much for some people. Adrian Higgins, garden writer for the Post, finds them overwhelming and too much, maybe, for a delicate constitution.

      Whites? A man of my acquaintance prefers whites over any other color. Ah, bleak winter again. Whites are good for separating two colors that might not look good side-by-side, but you don't want too many of them or the show weakens, hearkening back to the cold, dark times.

      After the flower show of spring, plants grow and change shape, giving you a subtly different garden every day. You can see them straining for dominance as you stand surrounded. Summer is a deep green ocean, punctuated with a cicada's buzz.

      More colors pop out in the fall. A few late-flowering plants show that they have something left in the tank and the canopy thins, revealing the puffy clouds and blue skies of the end of the year. Changes every day.

      Everyone has their favorite colors and arrangements. For me the colors of winter are best shown in a supporting role, letting the unmatched blaze of the spectrum celebrate the new garden year.

(c)2016 Barry Sperling